This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Capital B has chosen to use first names for some sources due to security concerns.
Photos by Adam Mahoney except where noted.
GREATER ACCRA REGION, Ghana — About an hour and a half east of Ghana’s capital city, Gladys Adgy stood outside a stand in Kpone waiting for an order of grilled tilapia.
Adgy watched the screen of her cracked smartphone pulse with messages from a friend and fellow-Ghanaian in New York City. She wanted to trade places with him and migrate to the U.S. for a steady job and better housing. But the American dream he described sounded increasingly disturbing. Though he had a green card, he told her that he and his family were living in hiding. They were afraid to go outside or answer a knock on the door, lest federal agents deport them.
Adgy and her friend live on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, but they and thousands more West Africans are struggling under the Trump administration’s aggressive enforcement of immigration laws. In the U.S., many Ghanaians with legal status are hunkering down in fear, as masked agents conduct televised raids in major U.S. cities. While in Ghana, many are trying to figure out how to carry out their migration plans in the new, hostile climate.
Because of a new deportation pact between Ghana and the U.S., it’s not just U.S. immigration officials that West Africans fear. Ghana has agreed to accept and detain deportees from the U.S. — even if they are not Ghanaian citizens and even in cases where migrants have already won legal protection.
Ghanaian leaders have defended the deal in the language of Pan-Africanism — a global movement to build unity, solidarity, and liberation for people of African descent everywhere — saying they’re taking the migrants to protect them from the U.S. detention system. At the same time, the government has quietly celebrated the agreement because it will lower visa restrictions for Ghanaians traveling to the U.S. and relax U.S. tariffs on the country.
Critics say the pact is unconstitutional and the conditions of detention often do not meet standards of international law.
“Ghana has effectively become a conveyor belt for U.S. deportations, acting as an instrument of the U.S. government in this regard,” said Ghanaian lawyer and activist Oliver Barker-Vormawor.
Every night, anywhere between five and nine people sleep in this home in Adgy’s neighborhood.
A new Capital B analysis found deportations of people from African nations are on pace to nearly triple compared to the Biden years, and the number of arrests and people held in U.S. detention centers have more than doubled this year.
More than 60% of African deportees this year have not been convicted of a crime, our analysis of data provided by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement found.
In November, Capital B spent time in three regions of Ghana speaking with residents wishing to immigrate to the U.S., people recently deported from the U.S., and lawyers representing deportees.
One person caught in this international dragnet spun by the United States and Ghana is Martin Berchie.
In early October, he boarded a plane in Minnesota bound for Ghana, shackled.
Berchie came to the U.S. on a student visa in 2018 to complete college, but his visa expired the following year. In 2021, he was convicted of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct, a misdemeanor. He was ordered deported after serving his sentence, but ICE released him in 2022 when Ghana did not issue did not issue the paperwork that would allow ICE to put him on a deportation flight. Since then, he has gotten married, started working in an IT job, and purchased a home.
During a routine immigration check in August, ICE arrested him. A federal judge recommended his release. But ICE obtained travel documents from the Ghanaian government anyway.
In a court filing, Berchie claimed ICE agents put his name on a travel document previously used for another deportee. Once back in Ghana, he said ICE officials abandoned him at the airport, and Ghanaian immigration officials then rejected his return because of paperwork issues.
The majority of Ghanaians are micro entrepreneurs, selling food and items at markets for a few dollars a day.
It was “akin to pushing Berchie out of a helicopter with a parachute,” his lawyer Nico Ratkowski wrote in the legal filing. Eventually, Ghana officials “had no other choice” but to process Berchie into Ghana, where he is now “lying low,” he said during a phone call with Capital B.
He is not alone. Across market stalls, law offices, and dim one-room apartments, people keep circling back to the thought of strangers — or themselves — sent off on unmarked flights, then locked away in barracks, and dragged across the floor by military personnel.
Everywhere, lives are being reordered around it.
Camps, courts, and quiet transfers
At one military camp outside the capital, deportees described being herded into a dusty, unclean hall with bare mattresses, no bedding, and no nearby toilets or running water. In another case, when lawyers from Barker-Vormawor’s firm arrived to challenge the removals, they watched as officers spent nearly an hour trying to wrench a grandmother out of a hotel lobby to deport her to a country she had not been to since a young child; at one point she clung to his leg while they dragged her across the tile toward a waiting van, gasping for air as he dug through her bag for an inhaler during an asthma attack.
Sometime around then, another deported woman attempted to take her own life, according to attorney Ana Dionne-Lanier. Dionne-Lanier’s own client, who was held in the same camp, reported that the incident occurred while detainees were being interviewed by officials attempting to remove them to their countries of origin.
Dionne-Lanier’s client — who had previously won a legal right to stay in the U.S. due to a credible fear of torture — was recently removed from the Ghanaian camp and flown back to his home country, where he is now hiding at a friend’s house to escape the persecution he originally fled.
Under the deportation agreement between Ghana and the U.S., Ghana is aiding America in deporting West Africans after their home countries, like Nigeria and Togo, have refused to take them.
People — many of whom have lived in the U.S. for decades and have already won asylum or other protection — are flown to Ghana, held in military camps and guarded hotels, and in many cases pushed onward to countries they fled years ago, despite court orders meant to shield them from torture or persecution. As of late November, over 40 West African deportees had moved throughout Ghana, in addition to over 200 Ghanaian deportees.
Capital B reached out to Ghana’s Immigration Service and the office of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, but did not receive a response.
For Nana Kwesi Osei Bonsu, a land and environmental defender now seeking asylum in Ohio, Ghana is not the “safe” country U.S. officials describe. A seventh-generation descendant of the Indigenous peoples of Ghana — the Ashanti Empire — he built a nonprofit to protect his community’s ancestral lands from powerful encroachers, he said. In return, he said, he was criminalized, tortured in police custody, and forced to flee.
“The Ghanaian government has actually failed to protect some of its own citizens,” he said. “So what credibility will they have to protect other countries’ nationals through these agreements?”
“These agreements make African governments partners in the Trump administration’s horrifying violations of immigrants’ human rights,” said Allan Ngari, Africa advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. The African governments, he said, were potentially “violating international law.” U.S. and international law prohibits the government from returning individuals to places where their life or freedom would be threatened.
After fleeing to the U.S., Osei Bonsu was paroled into the country as an asylum seeker with work authorization. But he is currently in ongoing removal proceedings and forced to regularly check in with ICE.
From the front seat of his car in Cleveland, where he drives Uber and Lyft up to 15 hours a day and often sleeps between shifts, he juggles calls with lawyers in Ghana and prepares filings for U.S. immigration court. He is caught between two governments: one that once tortured him and another that could still send him back.
“What brought me to the United States is the rise of authoritarianism and persecution,” he said. “And the price that came with [immigrating to the U.S.] has been the same.”
On social media and in Ghana’s streets and markets, meanwhile, public sentiment about the agreement is largely negative. Not due to concerns of human rights violations like advocates have argued, but because of Trump’s talk of only “criminals” and “bad people” being removed. The assumption is that these deportees, including the record-number of Ghanaians deported this year, must be violent and will bring crime to the nation.
However, the majority of deportees convicted of crimes were arrested for financial crimes such as check forgery or selling stolen or counterfeit goods, according to Capital B’s analysis.
“You would think that [our own economic struggles] would create some sort of empathy for persons who are caught up in this situation,” said Barker-Vormawor. “But there is no sense of solidarity.”
Barker-Vormawor’s organization, Democracy Hub, has sued the Ghanaian government, alleging that the agreement violates Ghana’s constitution. The case is being heard before the Ghanaian Supreme Court.
This is not the first such deportation deal: Ghana previously signed at least two controversial removal arrangements with Washington. Under the Obama administration in 2016, Ghana agreed to receive two Yemeni men released from Guantánamo Bay and then deported them, and two years later it entered another deal to take a backlog of thousands of Ghanaians facing deportation in exchange for lifting U.S. visa sanctions.
Despite the uptick during this second Trump administration, U.S. policies show clear racial disparities: During the Biden administration, Black migrants were deported at a rate four times more often than their numbers would suggest.
Ghanaian officials “are so blinded by this need to be in the good books of the U.S. that we haven’t even reckoned with the toxic, racialized undertones of these removals,” Barker-Vormawor said.
Children play soccer in Accra as women make their way home. The majority of youth in Ghana report wanting to migrate from the country.
When Pan-Africanism meets U.S. deportation policy
As a child, Richard Tetteh Martey said he would watch planes trace paths across the sky and imagine a “better future out there,” somewhere the system worked in ways he had only heard about from relatives abroad. But today, for the 27-year-old Ghanaian and recent college graduate in mechanical engineering, these dreams and the deportation deal sit alongside another set of choices that have reshaped Ghana’s place in the Black imagination.
Launched in 2019, Ghana’s “Year of Return” campaign invited people of African descent, especially Black Americans, to visit and settle in the country as a way to reconnect with the continent and boost tourism and investment. Officials have celebrated its success: Hundreds of thousands of visitors arrived that year and thousands of Black Americans are estimated to have relocated permanently, many of them concentrating in Accra and nearby coastal areas.
But the influx of relatively wealthier diaspora residents has collided with long-standing housing shortages and speculative real estate development, sharply raising prices and displacing lower-income Ghanaians from central Accra.
In Osu, a popular neighborhood in Accra for Americans, monthly rental prices have jumped to $1,100 — almost five times the regional average monthly income of $245.
In central Accra, monthly rental prices have jumped to $1,100 — almost five times the regional average income of $245 per month.
In the vegan café where Tetteh Martey works, he said most customers can now afford things he cannot: the smoothies he blends and the new condos across the street. For Tetteh Martey, it feels like a one-way arrangement: Ghana opened its doors, rolled out the red carpet, and rebranded neighborhoods for diaspora investors, while the U.S. is tightening its borders and expelling other Black migrants back the same route.
“It is quite concerning that we are welcoming people from the U.S. into our home, and they don’t want to reciprocate,” he said. “Someone with my qualifications from America can live here comfortably; I cannot.
From Accra to the Bronx, Ghanaians are searching for safety
William Yirenkyi understands how easily he could have been on those planes he has watched land from the U.S. with handcuffed migrants.
In 2013, he flew from Accra to Mexico City on a valid visa, then on to Tijuana, where he walked to the port of entry and told U.S. officers he wanted to come in. They took his belt, his phone, his fingerprints, and gave him a paper bracelet and a mat on the floor of a fluorescent‑lit room. After nearly a month in detention, they paroled him into the country with one year to stay, but no right to work and no guarantee his case would end in his favor.
“I would say 90% of the people want to leave,” Yirenkyi said flatly. (A recent survey found that two-thirds of peoplein the country want to migrate from Ghana.)
“Not because of anything but because of socioeconomic conditions. No jobs, health care system, our roads, housing deficit.”
In New Jersey, he found a small Ghanaian community, a brief off‑the‑books job in a dollar store owned by Pakistani immigrants, and started spending long evenings with friends. But in El Paso, Texas, where he moved to live with his white American fiancée, the walls closed in. Border Patrol trucks rolled past their subdivision at night. Without papers, he couldn’t take steady work or send money home. Days collapsed into nothing. After a year and a half, the relationship had turned volatile — sometimes abusive, he said — and the only choice he felt he controlled was to leave. His “self‑deportation” in early 2015 triggered a 10‑year reentry ban that lasted long after the shame of returning home with nothing.
“Sometimes I feel my life is at risk here because of the lack of opportunity,” Yirenkyi said. His options are becoming increasingly limited after he said a group of Ghanaian police officers attacked him last year. He recently petitioned the country’s human rights office to investigate the nation’s police force.
“I think there are a lot of opportunities in America, but it is dehumanizing that these are my only options,” he said from a coffee shop in Accra while wearing an American flag T-shirt.
From his new vantage point, he said, he understands the U.S. government’s inclination to clamp down on immigration, but what he cannot accept is deportation to places where people fear harm.
“Everybody has the right to safety,” he said.
But these days, safety is hard to find for Ghanaians, no matter where they are.
In New Jersey, Raymond is still stuck in his apartment.
In Ohio, Osei Bonsu is spending his nights in a parked car drafting legal briefs to defend the burial grounds of his ancestors back in Ghana.
In Kpone, Adgy is still dreaming of America while living on a few dollars a day.
And somewhere in Accra, Berchie is suspended between two countries that have both claimed they cannot keep him.
In the split-screen between welcome and removal, Ghana stands as both haven and holding pen, said the lawyer, Barker-Vormawor — “a mirror for the world’s uneven humanity.”
Years after illegally immigrating to the U.S. and failing to find a footing, William Yirenkyi still holds the country in the highest regard.